Not My Cup of Tea
by ChocolateAntelope
Summary: FE9/10, modern AU drabble, light Soren/Micaiah. Breakfast-time highlighted their differences best... and their similarities.


Note: Soren and Micaiah are college age in this AU. They live in the same house, but they're not married and they don't _do stuff_, so... just go along with it.

When the alarm clock buzzed Soren was already downstairs. His own internal alarm clock woke him up every day exactly at six o'clock in the morning, half an hour before Micaiah. From the kitchen he heard the beeping stop followed by footsteps to the bathroom.

By the time she had dressed, brushed her teeth, washed her face, straightened her hair, and dashed downstairs to the front door she saw that Soren already picked up the newspaper, so there was no need for her to go outside. He was perusing it, looking rather bored. On the countertop sat the coffee pot, steaming with freshly brewed coffee.

Her favorite morning beverage was coffee, black, with a generous amount of skim milk and only two sugar packets. Soren preferred tea in the mornings, usually unsweetened except for those rare occasions when he was in the mood for a ribbon of honey or a sugar cube.

"Good morning Micaiah," he greeted, still leafing through the newspaper.

"Morning, Soren." She filled a mug with coffee, stirred it, breathed in the aroma, and took a sip.

Soren found what he was looking for; he pulled out the sheet and placed the rest on the kitchen table. Micaiah reached for the pencil jar and withdrew two pens: a blue ball-point pen with a soft rubber grip for herself and a black fine gel ink pen for Soren, who loved to write fast.

He took the pen with a nod of thanks, and set to work immediately on the sudoku puzzle, entirely skipping over the easy difficulty and scrawling over the moderate-level puzzle. She found the crosswords page and began filling them in.

They spoke no more. No other sounds were made except for the occasional sip, some muttering to themselves, the tapping and scratching of pens on paper, and the hmms that Michaiah would make as she thought through a particularly tricky clue (Soren found it endearing at first, then distracting as they grew louder and louder).

He solved the puzzle and set his pen down. He looked up to see that she had finished the across clues at the exact same time. They shared a laugh, then the air tensed in concentration again as Soren started on the diabolical-level puzzle and Micaiah filled in the boxes for the first down clue.

By the time Soren had sweated through it, his hand was cramping and the pen was running dangerously low on ink (a shame, because those pens were expensive). Nevertheless a smirk appeared on his face as he checked over his annotations with the answer key.

"You got it all correct?"

"It appears so."

Then Soren and Micaiah switched puzzles. Micaiah left him a handful of clues to solve, and she herself began working on the easiest sudoku puzzle available.

He wasn't bad at the word puzzle, but everyone knew numbers was his true strength. His trick to crossword puzzles was not to solve the hints, but to try to guess which letters would best fit which box. He filled in the squares with what he deduced were the remaining letters.

Sudoku always looked easy when it was empty, but as she began filling in the squares, the seemingly innocent puzzle revealed its true colors. She always checked each row and column, but she'd always forget to check the cells too. Words were definitely easier to work with...

She finished her coffee before she finished the puzzle. To see if it would help, she stepped back and gazed over the whole puzzle. Blue, large, loopy numbers stood next to black, cramped, rigid numbers. Her handwriting contrasted brightly with his.

It was seven o'clock now. Soren reached for the remote, only to see that Micaiah turned on the television just at that moment. A screen displayed the temperatures for the week.

"It would be more efficient to just Google the weather," he remarked, switching the channel to a news station.

"If you're going to watch this, what's the point of reading the newspaper?"

"It's wise to collect information from several sources. Though the media does have a tendency to embellish the truth and bias depending on which political party it represents."

All in all, breakfast-time highlighted their differences best... and their similarities.

Note: I personally like this one, and I feel like I did a good enough job writing for a pairing I hate and will probably never write for again (because I dislike Michaiah). Whaddaya think?

If you'll check my profile you'll notice that my poll about which pairing you'd like to see is still up. The votes are even so I need someone to tip it in a direction. Thanks! You'll also see that I signed up to be a beta reader so cheers to that.


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